Page 60 of The Light Between Worlds

44

I DRINK COFFEE, BLACK, ALL MORNING, TRYING TOforget the interview with Scotland Yard and to lose myself in the fair copying Presswick has set out. The coffee eats at my empty stomach and I don’t even realize the rapid-fire tapping sound in the room is my own foot until Presswick snaps at me.

“Hapwell! What’s gotten into you today, girl? Take these files to the restoration room and go the long way—walk off some of those nerves.”

I gather up the files and bolt. There are stairs up to the restoration room not far from Presswick’s office, but I don’t take them. Instead I wander aimlessly past and through the rooms of the Ground Floor—the Scientific Department, where X-rays and photographs are made of pictures prior to cleaning, and the Reference Section, where paintings are kept in limbo, awaiting restoration or rehanging. Some of them have been waiting for years, ever since the war.

At the Ground Floor’s far end, I duck through one of the open rooms and up the stairs to the Main Floor. Kitty’s at the frontcounter, as always, hiding a mug of tea, as always, and I wave, but don’t go over. I haven’t the patience for a conversation just now. I’m buzzing with anxiety, guilt, regret, exhaustion—an entire toxic cocktail of emotions, shaken and stirred with an unconscionable amount of caffeine.

Not even the quiet of the Main Floor can calm me—the beautiful damask-hung walls, the hum of low voices, the meditative pace at which the visitors walk. And I refuse to glance up at the paintings on the walls. Whatever their truths are, I don’t want to know them. The only truth I’m interested in now is what’s happened to my sister, and for all their secrets and symbols, the Old Masters can’t tell me that.

I’ve taken a terribly roundabout way through the Gallery, and at the end of my walk I’ve got five rooms of construction to pick my way through. The Ministry of Works laborers are on the job, sanding and plastering and doing goodness knows what else. It’s dusty and messy and loud, not at all like the carefully planned exhibitions in the open wings.

Finally, I come to the restoration room. Presswick’s walked me past it, but I haven’t yet been inside. I step across the threshold and freeze.

Inside, the restoration room is a long, cavernous space with a glass-paned ceiling that lets in a flood of daylight. The floor is a jumble of easels and tables and stands, but the walls to my right and left are empty, drawing my attention forward to where three paintings hang in a row on the far wall.

Each one is a reproach in oil and brushstrokes.

The first is simple, a green landscape on a day of fitful rain,bathed with grey storm light that cuts through a rent in the clouds. A river runs through the fields, and a stand of trees masks the distant highlands. It must be from those trees that the stag has leapt, for he occupies the foreground, frozen in midstride. The whites of his eyes show and he’s caught forever, twisting toward the frothing hound that’s launched itself at his throat.

The second painting is more complicated, a lush Grecian landscape with purple vistas and a crumbling, columned ruin. Men armed with bows and trailed by dogs stand alongside a river, and a stag on the opposite bank regards them mildly, seeming not to care about the tight-strung bow trained upon him, the arrow nocked to the string, its shaft gleaming with promises of death.

The last picture is a confusion of figures, done mostly in sepia, as if all the color has bled out of the world. Men and dogs riot across the panel, and the chaos and clamor break over an unlikely pair in the foreground like waves on sand. A woman crouches before an arrow-pierced stag. She cradles the great creature’s head in her arms, and they regard each other, faces bare inches apart. Caught in the center of that frantic scene, they’re an island of calm, neither of their expressions strained or grieved. Instead, they’re wistful, weighted by memory, bound together in a moment of recognition and resignation that seems as if it will never end.

In the span of a heartbeat I take this all in, and swallow against the sourness in the back of my throat.

“You can’t be serious,” I mutter. The words come out bitter, and it’s only then I notice I’m not alone. I’d thought the room was empty when I first walked in.

A young man straightens from where he’s been bent over a table,the painting spread on it depicting a stag standing proud in a landscape of mist and heather. I catch a glimpse of his profile before he turns to me—brown hair, brown eyes, regular features, his white complexion a bit pale from too much time spent indoors. He’s an ordinary sort of handsome, pleasant and serious-looking.

But then he turns and I read his whole history in an instant, in the burns that pucker one side of his face and pull his mouth into an odd shape, that thin his hair and mottle the skin of his left hand—a hand from which three fingers are missing. I read it in the way he favors his injured side, the pained hitch in his step, and the mismatch of his shoes that means it’s not just fingers he’s lost, but a limb.

There are boys like this all over England. There were Woodlanders like this, too, following the war. Their sacrifice never sat easy with me then and it still doesn’t now.

The young man before me is flushed and miserable though he’s gallantly trying to get past it. One side of his mouth pulls up into a rueful smile but his eyes skitter away from mine and embarrassment creeps hot from under his collar.

“They should have warned you. I know it’s a bit of a wrench.”

My stomach drops out from inside me and I can feel the heat of tears I’ve held back since that disastrous interview at Scotland Yard.

“No, please,” I beg. “That’s not at all what I meant. I’ve had a ghastly morning, and look at the paintings—they’re all stags, and that means something to me, something I can’t get away from. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know, and I couldn’t even see.”

I don’t know how to make things right, and I can’t bear the idea of causing pain, not when I’ve spent a lifetime at war, not when allmy worlds have been filled with young people that time and circumstances tore to pieces.

I can’t take back what I’ve said, and can’t think of new words to mend the damage I’ve done. There is grief caught inside me, disastrously close to the surface, and I won’t burden this young man with my tears—won’t let them spill out like small knives to force his sympathy. I hurry out of the restoration studio and manage to keep myself whole until I find one blessedly empty room. It’s strewn with tarps I have to step around and I stumble twice, finally giving up in defeat and sitting down on a pile of rubble to cry.

Fitting, that I should end up here, when all my words bring such ruin. Words that, in the end, were not quite enough to keep the Woodlands from war. Words that led me to strike a bargain with a tyrant. Words I spoke to Evelyn on the beach, the day we came home. Words said in anger, before I left. And now this. I’ve become the girl from the old story. No matter what I say, no matter the intent, it’s toads and snakes that drop from my lips.

If I could only speak roses and gemstones instead, I’d happily cut my tongue on their thorns and edges.

Uneven footsteps echo in the room beyond. I hide my face in my hands because I can’t bear to be seen.

“Look, I believe you,” a kind voice says after a time. “And I’m sorry, too. I’m used to thinking the worst of people. It’s easier than being let down.”

When I look up, the young man from the restoration room crouches before me. He stands, a little unsteadily, then finds his balance and holds out a hand. I take it and allow myself to be pulled to my feet.

There’s a brief moment where we might let go. But I don’t, because I’m desperate to hold on to someone, and I’m hungry for the sympathy in this stranger’s brown eyes. He doesn’t let go either, for reasons of his own. Instead we stand, close as lovers, with my hand held fast in his.